Boomer kid lost in the 21st Century Chapter 321: The Crystal Ship

So, I was in a bar...(Pause. Realize how many of my stories start this way.) So I was in a bar one night (excuse me, a "gastropub," a bar where everything costs twice as much and they put artichokes on the nachos) when a round of karaoke broke out in another room. I looked at my partner and gained a nod. Nothing like the nod that Bogart gives the bandleader in Casablanca, freeing him to play le Marseilles. More like, "yeah, OK, go ahead. If you have to."

Someone wiser than me would have realized that a room full of people deliriously singing along with "Bohemian Rhapsody" and "American Pie" would be disinterested in B-side esoterica from 1967.  Indeed, the DJ had never heard of “Crystal Ship” by the Doors, but promised to check it out. And he may well have checked it out, but he sure as hell never asked me to sing it, so I left and went home and wrote about it. Smaller audience, cheaper beer.

I’ve loved this song since I first heard it, the melodic tone, almost autumnal, birthing an image of what it might mean to exist in a temporary community of wasted souls, none caring to think beyond the moment. My mind’s eye opens in sparse light, perhaps from candles or a lava lamp, or better, from a black light poster of sex positions of the zodiac. Drowsy bodies draped over the arms of ratty furniture, a couple making out in the corner. And the smell, the glue  holding it all together--dope. Marijuana. Pot. Cloying, yet etherial. This is where I hear the Crystal Ship and what I'd hoped to share with my fellow karaokeites, maybe even adding in my impression of Jim Morrison hanging on the microphone stand and calling out, “Hey! Anyone out there got any Percodan?" with just the right mix of stagger and swagger.

Music may be eternal, but nostalgia is personal and generational. It's impossible to share the depth of one’s experience with those from elsewhere and elsewhen. You might hear my songs, but you won't get all the way to the black light, the tendrils of rising smoke, the sensation of sitting on the floor with another, shoulder to shoulder flesh to flesh, and thank God there's a couch to lean on otherwise you’d both fall flat on your asses.

So, no time travel tonight. No chance to play act, conjure, fabricate, try to share something that may actually have never existed but sure would be cool. No opportunity to look out at the faces in that room and see if there was anyone who knew, who got it. Who felt it. One who would hear, “before I slip into unconsciousness, I’d like to have another kiss," close their eyes and call up their own memories of dimly lit, numb eroticism, and smile, knowingly.